One of my VRO ship mods has a Valhalla in it already, Rise of the Ossian Raider. I really like the idea of a XXL fab, there are a couple of ships in the mod packs I use that would fit better there. As for docking, the Terran 4-dock "button" as I like to call it is a good example of ships being able to dock without needing to be so close to the entry-ports the drones use on docking piers. Something might be able to be done with that in regards to solving the XXL docking issues you mentioned. Just a personal gripe, I really don't like the grey on that Tyr, and I'm kinda wondering who in Egosoft keeps adding Kim Kardashing level engines on their IP lol XD As someone who scours for X4 mods/updates as often as possible, this mod will make a great addition to my collection.

Hi there, thanks for the feedback! The issue I primarily have with the dock is more on the technical side (It involves defining a new "dock" type which I cannot get working so far). Right now though the 4-dock and the 3-dock piers (as long as it docks in the middle) are the best docks for it. As for the Tyr, it shares the same materials as the Odin but both look a bit off still. I'm still trying to find the right balance of effects for both so that I can make them look less flat.

Not sure what im doing wrong, I cant seem to be able to find the ships in my encyclopedia after i confirm its been downloaded. i uninstalled the prievious Tyr mod, i can see the other VRO mod ships.

Checked out some of the stats on the ship. With 1hr+ build times and being unable to spawn them in via cheat menu I didn't see them finish building, but these ships are huge. They truly are a league of their own. The Kyoto is awesome, but I think 150 small docks is a bit overkill, simply because the carrier can launch it's entire payload in one go. 200 small ship storage seems small compared to the physical scale of the ship, but the main issue with blatantly increasing actual numbers of ships in-game is that you hit a performance wall. I'm wondering if these ships would be better served as almost pseudo-stations. I grabbed the Terran Javelin construction blueprint for a similar purpose and one of these mobile, actual ships will fit that role even better.

My biggest concern with fitting these in to my own personal universe, however, is relative balance. Just one of those beasts is essentially an entire sector fleet in a single ship, not to mention subordinates. Do you have anything in between planned that would bridge the gap, or plans on ai using the ships? Right now, the most powerful non-cheatey ships I see in my game are from ROR, which, if I turned on the faction I could find "mk 3 Protector" variants the ai uses, but are unavailable to the player. They usually cap out around 6 million or so hull points alone, and so fit the in-between zone of XL ships, which usually hit up to 1.5 million hull points in VRO/mods I've seen. The size of the craft definitely justify 10 million hp though, that's for sure.

Another thing I noticed is that in blue or lighter sectors such as Heart of Acrimony, the jump-gates are going to be incredibly difficult to spot from afar. Not sure how to address that one, so I'm pretty torn on it too. I used to just cheat-menu the map+stations open, but after a recent vanilla playthrough, I've revamped my philosophy on modded games to give myself more of a sense of progression, and that kinda centers around opening up the map organically instead of all at once. I use XPan and X-Universe+ for added sectors, essentially doubling the size of the map it's self. Do you have alot of extra-ship mods in your VRO setup? Have you seen Ship Mod with the Titan? It's got an entire wharf/edock style bay in it, only thing missing is ship trader and ship modding compatibility.

I appreciate your work but these old designs don't fit into this new design.
I tested the Tyr standalone, great armament and well arranged, but the texture and engines do not fit into the game.
Is just my opinion.

Originally posted by Dreamweaver:

I'm kinda wondering who in Egosoft keeps adding Kim Kardashing level engines

Originally posted by Dreamweaver:

Checked out some of the stats on the ship. With 1hr+ build times and being unable to spawn them in via cheat menu I didn't see them finish building, but these ships are huge. They truly are a league of their own. The Kyoto is awesome, but I think 150 small docks is a bit overkill, simply because the carrier can launch it's entire payload in one go. 200 small ship storage seems small compared to the physical scale of the ship, but the main issue with blatantly increasing actual numbers of ships in-game is that you hit a performance wall. I'm wondering if these ships would be better served as almost pseudo-stations. I grabbed the Terran Javelin construction blueprint for a similar purpose and one of these mobile, actual ships will fit that role even better.

To be honest, the Kyoto gave me more trouble than any other ship so far due to me not being able to come up with how I want it to be so its nice to see other people's takes on it. I didn't really envision it to be a carrier but if it is what will work, I can properly adjust the capacity to reflect that. Although I'm curious on what that "Terran Javelin" is, I'm not sure I know what that is.

Originally posted by Dreamweaver:

My biggest concern with fitting these in to my own personal universe, however, is relative balance. Just one of those beasts is essentially an entire sector fleet in a single ship, not to mention subordinates. Do you have anything in between planned that would bridge the gap, or plans on ai using the ships? Right now, the most powerful non-cheatey ships I see in my game are from ROR, which, if I turned on the faction I could find "mk 3 Protector" variants the ai uses, but are unavailable to the player. They usually cap out around 6 million or so hull points alone, and so fit the in-between zone of XL ships, which usually hit up to 1.5 million hull points in VRO/mods I've seen. The size of the craft definitely justify 10 million hp though, that's for sure.

Heh, I guess these ships are extremely powerful on their own; however I tried to make them have visible weaknesses (well, maybe except for the Kyoto since it is still mostly not as finished as the other ships) like the Valhalla not having any medium turrets to deal with drones and the Tyr only having medium turrets on the middle to dedicate its role mainly as an anti-capital ship. I am currently not sure if there are ships that I can port which would fill the gap between the "XXL" and the "XL" class properly unless I try to include X3 ships from mods (which I might do actually on a separate one as to not ruin this one). Also if you decide to look into the mod's files, you might spot some interesting stuff that I might plan to make the AI use in the future.

Originally posted by Dreamweaver:

Another thing I noticed is that in blue or lighter sectors such as Heart of Acrimony, the jump-gates are going to be incredibly difficult to spot from afar. Not sure how to address that one, so I'm pretty torn on it too. I used to just cheat-menu the map+stations open, but after a recent vanilla playthrough, I've revamped my philosophy on modded games to give myself more of a sense of progression, and that kinda centers around opening up the map organically instead of all at once. I use XPan and X-Universe+ for added sectors, essentially doubling the size of the map it's self.

Regarding the jump gate mod, I've actually tried to make gates larger by x2.5 instead of making the collisions invisible which greatly improved their visibility, although it severely tanks performance for some reason. I will have to do more experiments to try and solve this problem but it is indeed the best solution for this one.

Originally posted by Dreamweaver:

Do you have alot of extra-ship mods in your VRO setup? Have you seen Ship Mod with the Titan? It's got an entire wharf/edock style bay in it, only thing missing is ship trader and ship modding compatibility.

Yeah I got a lot of ship mods installed on my end. If you're talking about J.L.'s mod with the X3-looking ships (with the one that basically has an entire station dock especially), I'm afraid that I cannot replicate it right now. I'm still learning about trying to put station stuff on ships :).

Originally posted by Richy:

I appreciate your work but these old designs don't fit into this new design.
I tested the Tyr standalone, great armament and well arranged, but the texture and engines do not fit into the game.
Is just my opinion.

Yeah there is only so much I can do with the original X3 models and textures heh. If only I were proficient with 3D modelling I'd be interested in remaking them with the X4 aesthetics.

Originally posted by Falken Moonlight:

Not sure what im doing wrong, I cant seem to be able to find the ships in my encyclopedia after i confirm its been downloaded. i uninstalled the prievious Tyr mod, i can see the other VRO mod ships.

I think I have to make it so that their entries are loaded in the encyclopedia by default on some XML file. I'll look into this when I got the time. Thanks!

Jumping back in to check out some things in my own X4. "Terran Javelin" was a station submitted for a contest in the construction community subforum on the official X4 Egosoft forums. It looks really nice, check it out! I've grabbed just about everything that was submitted in the construction community, there are alot of split designs and some really cool super stations. I usually leave those out of the game unless it's the HQ, but right now I'm setting up a creative archive universe of sorts to fly around in and check them out flying around in a ship.

Originally posted by dtaco:

To be honest, the Kyoto gave me more trouble than any other ship so far due to me not being able to come up with how I want it to be so its nice to see other people's takes on it. I didn't really envision it to be a carrier but if it is what will work, I can properly adjust the capacity to reflect that. Although I'm curious on what that "Terran Javelin" is, I'm not sure I know what that is.

Yo quick idea, what about making Kyoto an Auxilliary? That way other L/XL ships can, and will have reason to dock with it. All of the supergiants could use more drones too. I'm really picky about balancing my own games, so I generally don't want to see your ships get any more powerful, but I do think that 200 or so drone cap would be.. realistic? if that term even applies XD

Check out the construction community forum when you get a chance, "Terran Javelin is a station design that was submitted and is mostly just for looks, but appears to be functional. I was thinking about placing it somewhere in my active game.
The Kyoto is awesome, but sadly, the solution is not to increase ship storage cap beyond 400 or so. Trust me, I tried and tested with Ship Mod, the max number of ships you can fit in high attention near the player soft-caps near 350+ on my cpu. Not really much you can do beyond that in-sector, and out of sector is a non-issue either way, because you're always fighting against having too many assets on the active field when you get to those scales.

Originally posted by dtaco:

Heh, I guess these ships are extremely powerful on their own; however I tried to make them have visible weaknesses (well, maybe except for the Kyoto since it is still mostly not as finished as the other ships) like the Valhalla not having any medium turrets to deal with drones and the Tyr only having medium turrets on the middle to dedicate its role mainly as an anti-capital ship. I am currently not sure if there are ships that I can port which would fill the gap between the "XXL" and the "XL" class properly unless I try to include X3 ships from mods (which I might do actually on a separate one as to not ruin this one).

ROR's MK3 Protector variants of XL ships can act as a general guide to bridging the gap in terms of stats. Hull points around 3-6.5 million for that class, and 7million+ pretty much is the classification for your biggest ships, which I do believe are the largest ever released as a public mod, so ya know.. Do what you will with that info.

Originally posted by dtaco:

Regarding the jump gate mod, I've actually tried to make gates larger by x2.5 instead of making the collisions invisible which greatly improved their visibility, although it severely tanks performance for some reason. I will have to do more experiments to try and solve this problem but it is indeed the best solution for this one.

Can you just make some medium red/green/blue lights in a ring around it? Could avoid the collision issues while also solving visibility.

Originally posted by dtaco:

Yeah I got a lot of ship mods installed on my end. If you're talking about J.L.'s mod with the X3-looking ships (with the one that basically has an entire station dock especially), I'm afraid that I cannot replicate it right now. I'm still learning about trying to put station stuff on ships :).

I pretty much got em all too, except for the blatant/obvious cheats. Yours will the be only exception to that as far as OP stuff, but mostly just for eye-candy parked in a remote sectors+Sol

Originally posted by Dreamweaver:

Yo quick idea, what about making Kyoto an Auxilliary? That way other L/XL ships can, and will have reason to dock with it. All of the supergiants could use more drones too. I'm really picky about balancing my own games, so I generally don't want to see your ships get any more powerful, but I do think that 200 or so drone cap would be.. realistic? if that term even applies XD

Check out the construction community forum when you get a chance, "Terran Javelin is a station design that was submitted and is mostly just for looks, but appears to be functional. I was thinking about placing it somewhere in my active game.
The Kyoto is awesome, but sadly, the solution is not to increase ship storage cap beyond 400 or so. Trust me, I tried and tested with Ship Mod, the max number of ships you can fit in high attention near the player soft-caps near 350+ on my cpu. Not really much you can do beyond that in-sector, and out of sector is a non-issue either way, because you're always fighting against having too many assets on the active field when you get to those scales.

I would have to play around more with waypoints as they're responsible for the stuff that aux ships can do (I think? since the waypoint placements seem to suggest it) but I will note that one down :)

Originally posted by Dreamweaver:

ROR's MK3 Protector variants of XL ships can act as a general guide to bridging the gap in terms of stats. Hull points around 3-6.5 million for that class, and 7million+ pretty much is the classification for your biggest ships, which I do believe are the largest ever released as a public mod, so ya know.. Do what you will with that info.

The Eternal Dawn Protector MK3 actually has around 2x the hull of the Valhalla but it loses in a direct fight against it (though it beats the Kyoto). I plan to include custom X3 mod ARG ships in the near future and give both to the AI which could kind of balance everything out.

Originally posted by Dreamweaver:

Can you just make some medium red/green/blue lights in a ring around it? Could avoid the collision issues while also solving visibility.

I think I could add lights but the ships will not fit if the collisions aren't hidden, although I have one idea that I will try later that may solve both problems at once.

Originally posted by Dreamweaver:

I pretty much got em all too, except for the blatant/obvious cheats. Yours will the be only exception to that as far as OP stuff, but mostly just for eye-candy parked in a remote sectors+Sol

Well the Valhalla was pretty much like that in X3 so it kinda fits heh

The Raptor and Tokyo have a Accelerator in the Docking Bay. are you able to add one to the Kyoto? Also the s ship cap for the Odin needs to be increased.

I made the Odin that way to emphasize its role as a "Heavy Carrier". Basically the Tokyo handles the small ships while the Odin handles the medium ships.

As for the docking bay thing, its not an "accelerator" but a waypoint system that they use. The Kyoto alleviates the need for this through the various launch tubes located on the sides which allows for rapid deployment (like the Colossus).

Can you make an AUX ship using the Mobile mining base and/or Kyoto models? I think Auxilliaries *(the scripting) is underutilized. It's a carrier that also allows the ship in question to act as a mobile equipment dock. If I knew how, I would make those super-carriers in to Auxilliaries as far as the game is concerned. You can still use it as a carrier or battleship, but with the added benefit of supply fleet functionality too.

Personally, I think every ship that has a docking pad should have at least 1 ship storage space. Even if just 1 on a battleship with 16 pads (Though I personally would opt for 16 in that case). -The reason is simple, it allows ships to be moved in between pads (if they can't already) but also there's room for 1 ship on a docking pad that can open up in two and lower it's self down. We all seen it XD